Two Hours of Screaming, and One Dose Left

4 October 2026

I am writing this at twenty to two in the morning because I cannot do anything else, and because I want the dates written down while they are still today instead of something I remember later.

3 October 2026. It started at twenty-two minutes past three in the afternoon. It did not stop for two hours. It did not come in waves, which is what people assume when you say pain. It arrived, and it stayed, and it got worse while it stayed. By the end of it I was screaming, and I was screaming because there was nothing else available to do.

4 October 2026. It happened again. Two hours again. Screaming again. Right now it is in the bottoms of my feet, which is where it settles, and the only accurate word for it is needles. Not pins and needles. Needles.

The arithmetic, because it matters

On 21 September 2026 a doctor wrote me a taper. Before that I had been on roughly 285 morphine milligram equivalents a day for six years, and that had been stopped cold with no taper at all, and I had spent about two weeks with nothing.

The taper he wrote cut the dose in half in one step. Not ten percent. Half.

It was dispensed for fourteen days. Today is day thirteen.

I have one dose left.

The office is closed. It is the weekend. The next time a human being answers that telephone is Monday morning, and between here and there I have one dose and whatever comes after it is gone.

What I want on the record

I am not writing this to be pitied. I am fifty-eight years old, I have run my own company for twenty-eight years, and I worked yesterday, in between the two hours.

I am writing it because the thing that keeps happening in this story is that nobody writes anything down, and then later there is a disagreement about what happened, and the only person without a record is me.

So, for the record. 3 October, two hours. 4 October, two hours. Day thirteen of fourteen. One dose. Feet. Needles. Screaming.

That is what a fifty percent single-step reduction does to somebody who was on this medication for six years. Not in theory. On those dates, at those times, in this house.

If you are a doctor reading this because somebody sent it to you, I am not accusing you of anything. I am telling you what the week looked like from inside it, which is information you do not otherwise get, because by the time I am sitting in front of you I have washed and dressed and put on the face that makes the appointment go smoothly.

This is the other face. It is twenty to two in the morning, and this is what it looks like.